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Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, by Sarah Thornton. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. 191 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8195-5291-7. $15.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8195-6297-1.
You may read this book to learn how recorded music acquired cultural "authority" in Britain, how dance club d.j.'s became artists and celebrities, why dance clubs are so much bigger a part of teen life in Britain than in the United States. (Answer: fewer cars, lower drinking age, and less privacy for teens in smaller British homes.) However Club Cultures is not just a book about dance clubs, but a bold assault on the work of British subcultural theorists such as Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis, and the array of scholars associated with the Birmingham School. Thornton charges subcultural theorists with romanticizing youth cultures, consistently overestimating their oppositional character, accepting at face value their claims to radicalism and disaffiliation. Scholars acted as the "scribes" of youth subcultures rather than as their analysts.
Against this, Thornton argues for moving beyond the "reading" of text and style to understand how they are used in adolescent social life. In her account, young people deploy notions of artistic authenticity and opposition to the "mainstream" in order to pursue strategic advantage within their own social worlds. Drawing on Bourdieu, she develops a concept...